Under a DACA amnesty, American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill. About one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid. Since DACA’s inception under Obama, more than 2,100 illegal aliens have been kicked off the program after it was revealed that they were either criminals or gang members. JOHN BINDER

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

"Moreover, the vast bulk of the new jobs created in April were once again in the cheap-labor service sector, where many workers receive poverty-level wages."

"Even more significant, the number of people not in the labor force actually rose by 162,000 last month, and the proportion of the population in the labor force fell by a tenth of a percent. At 62.8 percent, the labor force participation rate remains only marginally above a four-decade low."

US corporate profits up 13.9 percent on cost-cutting and low wages

By Barry Grey
9 May 2017

Former Obama
administration officials joined the Trump administration and the media in
hailing the April employment figures released Friday as proof that the US
economy has reached “full employment” and essentially completed its “recovery”
from the Great Recession.

According to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 211,000 private-sector
non-farm jobs in April and the official jobless rate dropped to 4.4 percent,
the lowest level in more than a decade.

“JOBS, JOBS,
JOBS!” tweeted President Donald Trump. “Great news,” Labor Secretary Alexander
Acosta said on Twitter, adding later in a statement, “The steady and sustained
increase in job creation equals new paychecks for American workers and income
for American families.”

Jason Furman, the chief economic adviser in the Obama
administration, said, “The momentum in the job market is really impressive.”
The New York Times wrote that the report showed “a labor
market closing in on full capacity,” particularly in “the country’s flourishing
urban centers.”

On Monday,
Cleveland Federal Reserve President Loretta Mester, speaking in Chicago, said,
“We have met the maximum employment part of our mandate and inflation is
nearing our 2 percent goal.”

The message
from the ruling elite is clear: This is as good as it gets.

To present
the jobs report as proof of a healthy economy, certain aspects of the report
itself had to be downplayed or ignored, including the fact that average job
creation so far this year, 185,000 a month, is actually lower than in 2014 and 2015.
Even more significant, the number of people not in the labor force actually
rose by 162,000 last month, and the proportion of the population in the labor
force fell by a tenth of a percent. At 62.8 percent, the labor force
participation rate remains only marginally above a four-decade low.

While the
share of prime working age Americans (25 to 54) who are employed rose in April,
it remains well below the level at the peak of the last economic cycle and even
further below the level in 2000. This means there are

millions of working-age
people who have been

effectively excluded from the job market as a

result of
decades of factory closures and mass

layoffs, a process that has intensified
since

the 2008 financial crash. These millions of

people, living on the edge of
society, are not

even counted in the official unemployment

rate.

Moreover,
the vast bulk of the new jobs created in April were once again in the
cheap-labor service sector, where many workers receive poverty-level wages. The
statistic that is perhaps most revealing about what is being presented as the
“new normal” for a healthy economy is the miserable year-on-year average wage
increase of 2.5 percent, barely above the official inflation rate.

Even in 2006
and 2007, annual wage growth for non-managerial workers of 4 percent or more
was normal. That has been cut almost in half.

On Saturday, the same day the Wall Street Journal reported
the April employment figures, the newspaper featured a front-page article on US
corporate profits in the first three months of 2017 that pointed to the real
driving forces of the new “full employment” economy. Profits at S&P 500
companies surged an estimated 13.9 percent in the first quarter, the biggest
quarterly profit gain in five years.

At the heart of the profit bonanza, the Journal explained,
was a relentless and ongoing drive to cut costs by holding down wages, cutting
jobs and slashing spending on new plants and equipment. US big business, the
newspaper wrote, was reaping “the benefits of years of belt-tightening” under
conditions of a pickup in demand.

Because of
the continuing focus on slashing costs, profits rose nearly twice as fast as
revenue. Spending on equipment and buildings, i.e., productive investment, rose
by a mere 1.5 percent in the first quarter. Half the sectors of the US economy
actually cut capital spending from a year earlier.

The Journal provided some examples. Caterpillar,
the heavy machinery giant, reported a quarterly sales increase of about 4
percent, while doubling its profit, excluding restructuring costs. The company
has cut its global workforce by at least 16,000 since late 2015, a reduction of
roughly 10 percent. It has closed or announced the shutdown of plants in South
Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois and Belgium.

The energy
sector, partially recovering from the oil price collapse of previous years, saw
a 31 percent rise in revenues from the year-ago period. Based on its ruthless
cost-cutting over the past two years, including the elimination of over 200,000
jobs, the sector enjoyed a profit boost of 647 percent.

Exxon Mobil,
whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now Trump’s secretary of state, reported a
doubling of its profits in the first quarter, while its capital expenditures
dropped by 19 percent, as it “remained disciplined in its investment.”

Much of the
cash being taken in by the top

corporations on this entirely regressive basis

is being funneled to big shareholders in the

form of dividends and stock
buybacks.

On Sunday, the Financial Times devoted its “The
Big Read” page to an article extolling the achievements of 3G Capital, an
investment fund that partnered with Warren Buffett to buy the food conglomerate
Heinz in 2013 and merge it with Kraft Foods two years later. What the newspaper
called “The lean and mean approach of 3G” has resulted in more than 10,000
Heinz and Kraft workers—one-fifth of the work force—being laid off and seven
factories closed down.

3G’s “brutal
but disciplined attack on costs” produced a 58 percent surge in profits within
two years, and a profit margin of 28 percent. This compares to an average
profit margin in the food industry of 16 percent.

Such is the
utterly parasitic secret to the much-touted “recovery” in the US economy and
job market. A combination of speculation that feeds off of the destruction of
productive forces and ever greater exploitation of the working class benefits a
new aristocracy by impoverishing ever broader layers of the US and world
population.

Jared Kushner, Justin Trudeau Teamed Up to Save NAFTA

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the day the White House threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, emerged as a key conduit between the United States and Canada.

But his role has sparked a cross-border game of telephone and conflicting accounts about who called who first.

According to a White House official, aides to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Kushner urgently on April 26 after seeing news reports that Trump was considering signing an executive order withdrawing from NAFTA. Kushner, who has an expansive profile that includes foreign policy, speaks regularly to Canadian officials on a range of issues.

Kushner told his Canadian counterpart that this was a matter the leaders needed to discuss themselves, according to the White House official, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss private conversations. The Canadians asked when Trudeau should call. After checking at the White House, Kushner called back to say Trump was ready to talk now.

Trump has cited the call from Trudeau that quickly followed as the impetus for his decision to abandon the executive order and instead move to renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. The president also wielded the call from Trudeau, as well as a separate call from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, as proof that he has leverage over the other North American leaders as negotiations begin.

But accounts of Kushner’s involvement differed Monday in Canadian media reports. According to The Canadian Press news agency, it was Kushner who first reached out to Trudeau’s chief of staff to suggest a call between the two leaders.

Kushner, who worked as a real estate executive in New York before taking a job in the White House, is seen as a more moderate influence on the president. He’s also seen as more favorable to international trade agreements like NAFTA than some White House advisers, and a phone call from him to the Canadian prime minister could be viewed as an attempt to push Trump in his direction.

A spokeswoman for Trudeau declined comment.

IMMANENT COLLAPSE THE PENA-NIETO REGIME AND FALL TO THE LA RAZA DRUG CARTELS ON AMERICAN OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS.

More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.

“Mexico in a country whose four wealthiest billionaires control as much wealth as the bottom half of the population—the 65 million that live in poverty (which includes 13 million living in extreme poverty)—and where the top 10 percent as a whole accounts for 67 percent of Mexico’s national wealth.”

"If true, it shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having the courage to state his true beliefs to the American public who elected him. That's always been my biggest problem with Trump: his lack of integrity and consistent belief system." ----- ED STRAKER

“He's showing more empathy for illegal aliens than he is for American citizens. Shouldn't it be the concerns of Americans he should be considering first, before the feelings of illegals? These people are taking taxpayer money and American jobs, some committing crimes, and many are not assimilating and speaking English, and Trump wants them to stay?”

“The terrorist suspect’s most recent efforts through “open society” foundations he funds are bringing globalist gunpowder plots to places like Poland and Armenia, in the long march to make the world safe for plutocracy

BARACK OBAMA PLANS A THIRD TERM: HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, LA RAZA, MUSLIMS AND THOSE MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS HE FUNDED ARE BEHIND HIM…. Along with George Soros!

THE OBAMA COUP TO BE DICTATOR:

THE ARMY OF ILLEGALS TO BRING AMERICA DOWN AND FORM THE OBAMA MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP THAT WILL BE OPEN BORDERS AND PRO LA RAZA FASCIST SUPREMACY.

Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”

“Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their

ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if

it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well

as the tacit support of the mainstream media.”

THE LEGACY OF BARACK OBAMA:

Final Death of the American

White Middle Class

Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level.

Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.

THE OBAMA BOOK DEAL: Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.

Jared Kushner, Justin Trudeau Teamed Up to Save NAFTA

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the day the White House threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, emerged as a key conduit between the United States and Canada.

But his role has sparked a cross-border game of telephone and conflicting accounts about who called who first.

According to a White House official, aides to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Kushner urgently on April 26 after seeing news reports that Trump was considering signing an executive order withdrawing from NAFTA. Kushner, who has an expansive profile that includes foreign policy, speaks regularly to Canadian officials on a range of issues.

Kushner told his Canadian counterpart that this was a matter the leaders needed to discuss themselves, according to the White House official, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss private conversations. The Canadians asked when Trudeau should call. After checking at the White House, Kushner called back to say Trump was ready to talk now.

Trump has cited the call from Trudeau that quickly followed as the impetus for his decision to abandon the executive order and instead move to renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. The president also wielded the call from Trudeau, as well as a separate call from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, as proof that he has leverage over the other North American leaders as negotiations begin.

But accounts of Kushner’s involvement differed Monday in Canadian media reports. According to The Canadian Press news agency, it was Kushner who first reached out to Trudeau’s chief of staff to suggest a call between the two leaders.

Kushner, who worked as a real estate executive in New York before taking a job in the White House, is seen as a more moderate influence on the president. He’s also seen as more favorable to international trade agreements like NAFTA than some White House advisers, and a phone call from him to the Canadian prime minister could be viewed as an attempt to push Trump in his direction.

A spokeswoman for Trudeau declined comment.

IMMANENT COLLAPSE THE PENA-NIETO
REGIME AND FALL TO THE LA RAZA DRUG CARTELS ON AMERICAN OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS.

More significant still, a
former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash
Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal
immigrants and the construction of a border wall.

“Mexico in a country whose
four wealthiest billionaires control as much wealth as the bottom half of the
population—the 65 million that live in poverty (which includes 13 million
living in extreme poverty)—and where the top 10 percent as a whole accounts for
67 percent of Mexico’s national wealth.”

"If true, it
shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having the courage to state his
true beliefs to the American public who elected him. That's always been
my biggest problem with Trump: his lack of integrity and consistent belief
system." ----- ED STRAKER

“He's showing more empathy for illegal aliens than he is
for American citizens. Shouldn't it be the concerns of Americans he
should be considering first, before the feelings of illegals? These
people are taking taxpayer money and American jobs, some committing crimes, and
many are not assimilating and speaking English, and Trump wants them to stay?”

“The terrorist suspect’s most recent efforts through “open
society” foundations he funds are bringing globalist gunpowder plots to places
like Poland and Armenia, in the long march to make the world safe for
plutocracy

BARACK OBAMA PLANS A THIRD TERM: HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, LA RAZA, MUSLIMS
AND THOSE MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS HE FUNDED ARE BEHIND HIM…. Along with George
Soros!

THE OBAMA COUP TO BE DICTATOR:

THE ARMY OF ILLEGALS TO BRING
AMERICA DOWN AND FORM THE OBAMA MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP THAT WILL BE OPEN
BORDERS AND PRO LA RAZA FASCIST SUPREMACY.

Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman
Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY)
“OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever
was.”

“Barack
Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their

ostensible
machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if

it were
not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as
well

as the
tacit support of the mainstream media.”

THE LEGACY OF
BARACK OBAMA:

Final Death of the American

White Middle Class

Under the
Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to
economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist
below the poverty level.

Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts
of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the
Brookings Institution.

THE OBAMA BOOK DEAL: Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5
million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made
to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s
geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the
wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.

REALITY ON THE JOBS SITUATION BEFORE THE BOOKS ARE COOKED:

"Moreover, the vast bulk of the new jobs created in April were once again in the cheap-labor service sector, where many workers receive poverty-level wages."

"Even more significant, the number of people not in the labor force actually rose by 162,000 last month, and the proportion of the population in the labor force fell by a tenth of a percent. At 62.8 percent, the labor force participation rate remains only marginally above a four-decade low."

US corporate profits up 13.9 percent on cost-cutting and low wages

By Barry Grey9 May 2017

Former Obama administration officials joined the Trump administration and the media in hailing the April employment figures released Friday as proof that the US economy has reached “full employment” and essentially completed its “recovery” from the Great Recession.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 211,000 private-sector non-farm jobs in April and the official jobless rate dropped to 4.4 percent, the lowest level in more than a decade.

“JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!” tweeted President Donald Trump. “Great news,” Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said on Twitter, adding later in a statement, “The steady and sustained increase in job creation equals new paychecks for American workers and income for American families.”

Jason Furman, the chief economic adviser in the Obama administration, said, “The momentum in the job market is really impressive.” The New York Times wrote that the report showed “a labor market closing in on full capacity,” particularly in “the country’s flourishing urban centers.”

On Monday, Cleveland Federal Reserve President Loretta Mester, speaking in Chicago, said, “We have met the maximum employment part of our mandate and inflation is nearing our 2 percent goal.”

The message from the ruling elite is clear: This is as good as it gets.

To present the jobs report as proof of a healthy economy, certain aspects of the report itself had to be downplayed or ignored, including the fact that average job creation so far this year, 185,000 a month, is actually lower than in 2014 and 2015. Even more significant, the number of people not in the labor force actually rose by 162,000 last month, and the proportion of the population in the labor force fell by a tenth of a percent. At 62.8 percent, the labor force participation rate remains only marginally above a four-decade low.

While the share of prime working age Americans (25 to 54) who are employed rose in April, it remains well below the level at the peak of the last economic cycle and even further below the level in 2000. This means there are

millions of working-age people who have been

effectively excluded from the job market as a

result of decades of factory closures and mass

layoffs, a process that has intensified since

the 2008 financial crash. These millions of

people, living on the edge of society, are not

even counted in the official unemployment

rate.

Moreover, the vast bulk of the new jobs created in April were once again in the cheap-labor service sector, where many workers receive poverty-level wages. The statistic that is perhaps most revealing about what is being presented as the “new normal” for a healthy economy is the miserable year-on-year average wage increase of 2.5 percent, barely above the official inflation rate.

Even in 2006 and 2007, annual wage growth for non-managerial workers of 4 percent or more was normal. That has been cut almost in half.

On Saturday, the same day the Wall Street Journal reported the April employment figures, the newspaper featured a front-page article on US corporate profits in the first three months of 2017 that pointed to the real driving forces of the new “full employment” economy. Profits at S&P 500 companies surged an estimated 13.9 percent in the first quarter, the biggest quarterly profit gain in five years.

At the heart of the profit bonanza, the Journal explained, was a relentless and ongoing drive to cut costs by holding down wages, cutting jobs and slashing spending on new plants and equipment. US big business, the newspaper wrote, was reaping “the benefits of years of belt-tightening” under conditions of a pickup in demand.

Because of the continuing focus on slashing costs, profits rose nearly twice as fast as revenue. Spending on equipment and buildings, i.e., productive investment, rose by a mere 1.5 percent in the first quarter. Half the sectors of the US economy actually cut capital spending from a year earlier.

The Journal provided some examples. Caterpillar, the heavy machinery giant, reported a quarterly sales increase of about 4 percent, while doubling its profit, excluding restructuring costs. The company has cut its global workforce by at least 16,000 since late 2015, a reduction of roughly 10 percent. It has closed or announced the shutdown of plants in South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois and Belgium.

The energy sector, partially recovering from the oil price collapse of previous years, saw a 31 percent rise in revenues from the year-ago period. Based on its ruthless cost-cutting over the past two years, including the elimination of over 200,000 jobs, the sector enjoyed a profit boost of 647 percent.

Exxon Mobil, whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now Trump’s secretary of state, reported a doubling of its profits in the first quarter, while its capital expenditures dropped by 19 percent, as it “remained disciplined in its investment.”

Much of the cash being taken in by the top

corporations on this entirely regressive basis

is being funneled to big shareholders in the

form of dividends and stock buybacks.

On Sunday, the Financial Times devoted its “The Big Read” page to an article extolling the achievements of 3G Capital, an investment fund that partnered with Warren Buffett to buy the food conglomerate Heinz in 2013 and merge it with Kraft Foods two years later. What the newspaper called “The lean and mean approach of 3G” has resulted in more than 10,000 Heinz and Kraft workers—one-fifth of the work force—being laid off and seven factories closed down.

3G’s “brutal but disciplined attack on costs” produced a 58 percent surge in profits within two years, and a profit margin of 28 percent. This compares to an average profit margin in the food industry of 16 percent.

Such is the utterly parasitic secret to the much-touted “recovery” in the US economy and job market. A combination of speculation that feeds off of the destruction of productive forces and ever greater exploitation of the working class benefits a new aristocracy by impoverishing ever broader layers of the US and world population.

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com